Real Food and Spirituality

Can real food be the ultimate spiritual path? Let me tell you how I see it.

It’s been a while since I immersed myself in this, let’s say, the so called spiritual world... Since I began practicing yoga, I traveled, went into deep fasts, temazcal ceremonies, sacred plants, and the path of vision quest (a cycle I already closed, and a medicine I truly love).

And here starts the crazy phenomenon: if I had to count it as strictly spiritual or personal knowledge, I would say that “all this” may have started with my yoga practices. But also, if I see it from the concept of spirituality I hold today, or better said, from the perspective with which I dimension spirituality today, I’d tell you it began when I made the decision to step into the path of Real Food, aka: quitting processed foods…

I don’t intend to list all my practices. This article is not about breaking down what I’ve done or gone through.

The goal is clear: to tell you what spirituality —for me— really is, what it’s really aiming for, and also to invite you to integrate it in what you’re walking through and in your daily life.

Long story short

at 21, after reading a book called The Story of Stuff, I realized the impact that certain things I consumed had on the environment, especially food. Coffee, packaging… At around 22-ish, a university professor gave us such a deep class on the dairy industry that, after a few emails I exchanged with her and reading the papers she shared, I stopped consuming dairy. The thing is, it all started as a way of militating, or maybe just doing my best not to contribute (so much) to that environmental impact, and as a sort of militancy “against” the food industry as a tool of social control…

This way of eating brought me habit changes like, gradually, adopting a vegan diet and behaviors like quitting alcohol and, later, not feeling like going to nightclubs anymore. From there, choices, tendencies, and encounters started shaping a kind of destiny that began with yoga practice, continued with backpacking through communities and people who worked with real foods, then plants and ceremonies; it led me to a yoga teacher training and, eventually, here I am: trained in Reiki and Akashic Records, holding cacao circles and rituals for people, speaking of the spirit of plants.

Me, who studied nutrition, did the postgrad, took international courses on anthropometry, trained in evolutionary nutrition, and at 18 pictured myself wearing a white coat. Yes, maybe in schools or community kitchens… but this “spirit thing” was not something I linked with food / health and nustrition.

If you had asked me back then, in the early days of my militancy, when I was quite angry and combative, I’d tell you I pictured myself giving a somewhat political speech, talking about the state, moving masses hahaha… but with a dress and a drum? Never.

Sometimes I -still- can’t even believe it myself.

Today, with the grace of life and the wise spirit of cacao, which always, always guides us toward the INTEGRATION of our truth, I start to understand the “what for.”..

I won’t deny it: part of me is deeply happy to have reconnected with that part of myself that sees food as an expression of culture, as a possibility of freedom, and as a vote of confidence in other possible worlds.

Last week I wrote a post about this connection between the concept of Real Food and cacao. You can check it here.

Basically, the post says that..

..starting from the fact that food is information, and that our body is constantly integrating this information, it is received and integrated through digestion. The digestive process is the body’s ability to turn the simple into the complex.

Cacao, being both a plant and a superfood, has a chemical complexity, plus the energetic information it carries as the spiritual medicine it is. Real Food will be efficiently digested by your system.

Your system, the one evaluating and receiving this information, is physical-chemical and etheric.

So, Real Food will be the one most compatible with your human condition. The one that provides complete nourishment, one that, in harmony, nourishes your physical-chemical system (body of flesh, emotions, and thoughts) and your etheric system (your spirit, your vital energy, your connection with the whole).From this perspective, cacao —always from a loving, trustworthy source— is intrinsically and undoubtedly Real Food.

Spirituality and 'that' sense of separation ...

When we enter these spiritual universes, in the search for self-knowledge, in the more “subtle” paths, I find that often there’s a tendency to disconnect from the earthly. Or, well, at least that’s what happened to me! he.

.I also find it can be the other way around: when we care about the environment, about having a healthy body, and we seek balanced, organic food… we tend to get more mental. In many cases, the connection between that health, that cleanliness we want in our body and on our plate with its origin, with its link to the whole, is not considered (who produces the food, who we share it with, what behaviors we adopt from these choices, like isolating ourselves, obsessing, buying super expensive things that come from the other side of the world and are grown in labs… and so on).

I believe that spirituality is COMPLETELY what connects us with the earthly, with the best way of living on Earth.

In fact, there is no spirituality that pulls us away from being human.

Or maybe, I only believe in the spirituality that brings us closer to our humanity.

I believe the ultimate purpose of spirituality is to embrace the human in us.

What does it mean to be human for me?

It’s being earthly. Meaning, beings that inhabit the Earth, in awareness that on this planet there is an unavoidable interconnection of and between all that exists.There’s no hierarchy, there is a natural order that invites us to be part of it in body, in flesh, and in action, in the place where our soul chose to incarnate.

Real Food is all this.

Isn’t it a celebration, after all?

Isn’t it wonderful that, through the choice of food, we can navigate so many of our complexities and, at the same time, nourish our spirit by practicing a good connection with the whole?

Drinking cacao in circles, singing to Pachamama, meditating… and then sharing the table, making healthy decisions not only for our flat belly and good lab results in triglycerides and thyroids, but also for the planet we want to inhabit: that luminous place that is every space where life unfolds with that wildly perfect order of being.

Thank you for reading.

Lots of love,

Sol Luciana.